A significant increase in housing costs makes home ownership unattainable for many Gen Z individuals, leading to financial nihilism, said CoinFund's David Pakman. Feb 11, 2026, 6:06 p.m. The surge in speculation driving prediction markets and leveraged bets on various sectors isn’t reckless, it’s rational, according to CoinFund managing partner David Pakman. In a presentation during Consensus Hong Kong , Pakman reframed the behavior as “economic nihilism ,” a calculated response by Gen Z to structural barriers in wealth building. STORY CONTINUES BELOW His case started with housing. For Gen X and Boomers, he said, the average home cost about 4.5 times their annual salary. For Gen Z, it’s closer to 7.5 times. That shift, Pakman argued, effectively shuts younger people out of the housing market, long considered the cornerstone of middle-class wealth. Only 13% of 25-year-olds own their homes, over half of Gen Z investors now own crypto, he said. With few traditional options, Pakman said younger generations are turning to high-risk bets, including memecoins, perpetual futures, zero-days-to-expiration options and prediction markets, not out of ignorance but as a strategy. “It's becoming actually rational to think that if the typical ways that long-term wealth creation is closed off to you, a small chance at a large return beats near certainty of slow decline,” he said. He pointed to crypto perpetual contracts. These products, futures contracts that don't expire, saw $100 trillion in notional volume last year, according to data he shared. Prediction markets also exploded, from $100 million to $44 billion in just three years. While some pundits use them for political forecasting, Pakman said 80% of the activity is sports betting. Dune data paints a similar picture, with $1.8 billion out of $2 billion in daily prediction-market volumes centered on sports at the beginning of the month. Pakman urged builders to meet it with better tools. “It's up to us in crypto to build products that allow the expression of risk in more transparent ways, that are more fair, have lower fees, and can be more transparent to both disclose risk and payout abilities,” he said. More For You Ondo and Securitize execs say utility, not hype, will drive tokenization’s next phase 22 minutes ago Executives from both firms say the next phase of tokenization must prioritize functionality and compliance during a panel at Consensus in Hong Kong. What to know: Executives from Securitize and Ondo Finance say tokenization’s growth will depend less on hype and more on delivering clear, real-world uses for tokenized assets. While institutional interest is strong, Securitize’s Graham Ferguson says regulatory compliance and on-chain distribution via exchanges and DeFi protocols remain major bottlenecks. Ondo’s Min Lin argues that enabling tokenized Treasuries, stocks and ETFs to be used as margin collateral in DeFi shows how added utility and capital efficiency can drive the next phase of tokenization. Read full story